Thursday, January 15, 2009

Rob's Theme Week

by Julie Coulter Bellon

I was contemplating Rob’s blog early this morning as I sat in a hospital waiting room, (they make you bring a responsible person to drive you home after you’ve been sedated and someone chose me to be their responsible person. Awwww) and I met the most interesting women. The first woman struck up a conversation with me about how soft and squishy the waiting room chairs were, which turned into how hard it would be to get out of said chair if you were pregnant, and then the conversation inevitably turned to children.

She told me about her children and how difficult her pregnancies had been. She had a pretty good story and I was just about to tell her something about my recent pregnancy, when another lady joined us in the waiting room, and, eyeing both of us with a smile, she said she had the best pregnancy story ever.

Just then a nurse called for her and said she could go sit with her friend until the sedation took effect. I admit, I was a little disappointed because I’d wanted to hear the best pregnancy story ever. Much to my delight, the woman nodded to the nurse, but didn’t get up. She then proceeded to tell her story. As a young woman, she’d been told she could never have children. After some difficult times in her marriage, her weight had ballooned, so she decided to get it under control, and lost a hundred pounds. After a while, she found she was putting the weight back on and the gas bubbles she had suffered with for some time had come back. Some very bad gas bubbles in her tummy. She didn’t think too much of it, however, and wanted to exercise more to lose the weight she was gaining back. While shopping with a friend one day, her friend kindly told her she was waddling and looked pregnant. The woman assured her she was not, but the friend persisted, and even went so far as to buy her a pregnancy test. The woman took it to prove that she was not pregnant and to her surprise, it came back positive. She went to the doctor who immediately sent her to the hospital for an ultrasound. The ultrasound revealed that she was full-term, pregnant with a healthy boy.

But it didn’t stop there. She had been having some funny stomach twinges one day while preparing to take a friend to the dentist. Her first thought was to just take a Tylenol and go about her day, but her friend told her she needed to get checked out, just to make sure the pregnancy was okay. When she went to get checked out, the doctors told her she was in active labor. The nurses teased her about being so unaware of both a pregnancy and labor and her one and only child was born that day, just three weeks after learning she was pregnant in the first place. I guess it was all a matter of perspective---she wasn’t expecting a pregnancy so she excused any symptoms away as something else.

She got up and left to be with her friend and the other woman and I sat in silence for a few moments. It was a good story. It was a wow story. I mean, I’d heard about women who said they didn’t know they were pregnant, but never met one and heard the story first hand. The silence between us stretched a little longer, until Rob’s conversational advice came back to me, so I brilliantly said, "How ‘bout them Yankees?”

4 Comments:

I worked with a woman who went into the doctor for something minor and found our she was full term. She had the baby five days later--she had no furniture, no clothes, nothing. When she got to the hospital (in Vegas) to give birth they thought she was a vagrant or something because she hadn't been in for any prenatal stuff.

I can't imagine being that oblivious to your body's signs, but then, pregnancy is supposed to be different for everyone, so who knows.

The saddest case of all that I know of happened 33 years ago when I was working at Holy Cross Hospital. An 18 year-old girl came in to the ER in full labor, absolutely denying she was pregnant, delivered the baby denying it was hers, and refused to see it at all. Catholic Charities worked with her and she signed the papers to have it adopted, still refusing to see it. On her fifth and final day in the hospital a social worker convinced her that if she took the baby home, she would get a bigger welfare check (she already had a child at home). The priest was livid, everyone was shocked. I've always wondered what kind of life that poor child had.